Seth Holmes

Physician and anthropologist Seth M. Holmes grew up in eastern Washington. After studying Ecology and Spanish at the University of Washington, he earned an MD and PhD in Medical Anthropology from the combined program at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. He went on to complete his internship and residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has also held fellowships at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Rochester. He is currently a professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, where he also directs the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and the same joint MD/PhD program that he graduated from. Holmes has conducted in-depth research into health inequalities, immigration, and physician training across Mexico and the United States. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies was based on Holmes’s dissertation research and has won numerous prizes, including the 2013 New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology. Holmes also won the 2014 Margaret Mead Award for his research’s public significance, and he has appeared in several popular news outlets and radio shows. His more recent research focuses on the way that doctors-in-training learn to understand social inequality in clinical settings. However, Holmes is also studying political representations of refugees in Europe and young Latinx people’s experiences growing up in California.